There is no arguing with an emergency.  When something unfortunate happens, the urgent thing to do is call 911.  However, I think about all the people who are alone at the time of an accident. This woman was unable to reach her phone.

Cindy Lincoln has been at Heartland Health Care Center in Palm Beach Gardens for over a week recovering from an injury she suffered while doing laundry.  It happened on Memorial Day. Lincoln’s husband was out of town and she had the house to herself.

“I worked all day, went to bed, woke up at midnight and decided to fold some clothes,” Lincoln said. As she sat in an office chair folding towels, she dropped one on the floor. When she bent down to pick it up, the chair rolled out from underneath her, causing her to fall. “When it slammed up against the wall. I heard a crunch. I knew I was in big trouble,” Lincoln said. The crunch she heard was her femur bone, breaking.

From: News Channel 5 WPTV

News is  breaking on Twitter more frequently than television.  I tend to analyze the sense of urgency as being identical to an individual emergency. If someone is in trouble,  we react accordingly.

Facebook, in this situation, contained a solid network  and communication between her family.  She was able to report the emergency with more reach than attempting to make a phone call.  Thanks to the real-time capabilites of smartphones,  her network was able to react.

The biggest concern I see is people not taking advantage of these social media channels.   Some tend to think nobody is listening, and completely drop off the radar.  Lives are lost due to a person not being able to report an emergency.

One of the best examples I’ve discovered is a gentlemen using the web to recover his stolen laptop.  Twitter jumped sooner than Law Enforcement.  Credit goes to the web for the urgency behind the story.